Monthly Archives: December 2007

You guys remember when we were forced to change notes or articles on our classroom notice board every week or so? It’s been almost 2 months since the last post! hahaha! Come on, guys!

Don’t you just love using GMail? I first got my invitation from ‘Pembunuh‘ (thanks bro!), thinking that it’s on ‘invitation only’ basis, I accepted and completely forgot about it. Not until I realized the ‘group-by-subject’ feature eased the pain of going through ‘thread-like’ discussions, in conventional email inbox, that I thought of moving on to GMail. The rest is history.

There are lots of neat features embedded in GMail, but they are useless if we do not make use of them. I’m not getting into all of the features, but I’ll start with the not so common ones I usually use. These will also work with your @mckk9296.com email account (provided you use the webmail version).

1. Your GMail account alias
The alias (or call it what ever you want) I’m talking about here is like an alternative email address for your original profile. No, it is not like you create another email, because it will go to the same inbox. For example, abc123@gmail.com is the Abu’s email address, I can send an email to abc123+cikun@gmail.com and the email will still be sent to Abu. (Note the bold +cikun after the abc123)

What the f@#k is this feature helping me? There are many helpful ways you can benefit from this. One of them is tracking your source of spam. For instance, if you register in Friendster, you put abc123+friendster@gmail.com as your email address, you can easily apply a filter (and automatically assign the filter to label Friendster) without the hassle of identifying the source of email – because you know the email sent to abc123+friendster@gmail.com will always be from Friendster.

So what does this got to do with spam management? GMail has a good spam filtering, yes, but this way you can identify the culprits giving away your email addresses.

2. Search function
On the top left of the screen, just beside the GMail logo, there is a textbox for search. The common search will give you messages that contain whatever it is that you put there. However, you could also add advanced operands to minimize the scope of your search.

is operator
I don’t really know the full function of this operand, but I always use this to view unread messages. Available commands, is: unread, is: read and is: starred

from operator
This will return the message sender. For example, from: pembunuh

label operator
Only applicable if you have labels added to your inbox. Will return every message in that particular label. For example, label: mckk9296

The rest of other search operators are list here. You’ll get the idea how it will benefit you.